There is a pueblo called Pecos,
which must have been one of the largest in former times. Those people
worked hard. But today there cannot be forty Indians of both sexes. It
is a shame. It could be resettled with other people.

Custos Isidoro Barcenilla,
1815

Never, Most Excellent Sir, will
we look with indifference on an action which has caused us almost total
ruin. Our loss could hardly be greater. We see ourselves despoiled of
the land on which we, from our eldest to the youngest of our people,
have spilled the sweat of our brows, working it in such a way that it
might furnish us our subsistence. Will it be reasonable or just that
others profit from our labor, without any remuneration? It hardly seems
possible. That decision bears not the least semblance of equity. We
commit to the wisdom of Your Excellency all the injuries that must be
our lot as a consequence of such violent despoilment.

Petition of the Pecos Indians,
March 9, 1829

This village, anciently so
renowned, lies twenty-five miles eastward of Santa Fé, and near the
Rio Pecos, to which it gave name. Even so late as ten years ago,
when it contained a population of fifty to a hundred souls, the
traveller would oftentimes perceive but a solitary Indian, a woman, or a
child, standing here and there like so many statues upon the roofs of
their houses, with their eyes fixed on the eastern horizon, or leaning
against a wall or a fence, listlessly gazing at the passing stranger;
while at other times not a soul was to be seen in any direction, and the
sepulchral silence of the place was only disturbed by the occasional
barking of a dog, or the cackling of hens.

Josiah Gregg, Commerce of the
Prairies, 1844.

Josiah Gregg. Gregg, Commerce

Dwindling Remnant

If, as Josiah Gregg claimed, the last of the Pecos
could be seen in the 1830s gazing off to the east, their thoughts were
probably less bound up with the return of "Montezuma" than with the
plains themselves, source of the wealth and the danger that once had
made their pueblo the strongest of them all. Now as calicoes, hairpins,
and hardware, the richest trade in the history of the plains, jolted by
in the beds of Pittsburgh wagons, the Pecos had no part in it. They were
too few now to be of any useas converts to Christianity, as
vassals or allies, as traders or carpenters. The priest came only when
he had to, or not at all. The settlers in the valley encroached on the
land of their fathers. Pecos was dying.

Fernando de Chacón

Settling San Miguel del Vado

For the venerable pueblo at the eastern gateway, the
turn of the century was a watershed. The New Mexico census of 1799 was
the last to show Pecos with more Indians than non-Indians, 159 to 150.
Five years before, in 1794, there had been no "españoles y
castas" at all, no plaza or settlement of Hispanos dependent on the
interim missionary of Pecos. With the petition of Lorenzo Márquez and
his fifty-one land-poor compañeros, admitted by Gov. Fernando
Chacó on November 25, 1794, the eastern pueblo's traditional isolation
began to break down.

The caravan in sight of Santa Fe. Gregg,
Commerce

Their reasons for requesting a large settlement grant
were the usual ones. "Although we all have some pieces of land in this
villa [Santa Fe], they are not sufficient for our support, both because
they are small and because of the great shortage of water and the crowd
of people who make it impossible for all of us to enjoy its use." Since
the Comanches by the mid-nineties appeared firmly committed to peace,
New Mexicans could now contemplate the grass and good bottoms in the
valley of the Río Pecos with an eye to possession. Márquez and company
had already staked out a fine uninhabited site.

Twenty-odd miles downriver southeast of Pecos pueblo,
it lay at the place where the trail to the plains crossed the river,
"where," according to the petition, "there is space enough not only for
the fifty-one of us [fifty-two counting Márquez] who ask but also for as
many in the province who are destitute." They described the boundaries
of this new Eden simply: "in the north the Río de la Vaca [Cow Creek]
from the place called La Ranchería to El Agua Caliente; in the south El
Cañón Blanco; in the east La Cuesta and Los Cerritos de Bernal; and in
the west the place commonly called El Gusano [South San Isidro]."

Thirteen of the fifty-two men who applied were
genízaros, those ransomed Indians and their descendants who lived
as Hispanos, exactly twenty-five percent. Although more genízaros would
move to the area later, the settlers themselves fostered the
quarter-truth that his was "a genízaro settlement" in order to win
concessions from church and state. Twenty-five of the fifty-two had
firearms. All of them pledged as one "to enclose ourselves in a plaza
well fortified with bulwarks and towers and to make every effort to lay
in all the firearms and munitions we possibly can."

Conditions of the Grant

That sounded good to Governor Chacón. At his orders,
don Antonio José Ortiz, alcalde mayor of Santa Fe, rode out next day to
put the El Vado grantees in possession. First he read to them the
conditions of the grant: 1) it was to be common, not for them alone but
for future settlers as well; 2) they must be armed with firearms or bows
and arrows, muster periodically, and all have converted to firearms at
the end of two yearsthose who had not would be expelled; 3) they
must build the plaza within the stipulated boundaries of the
grant"During the interim they should locate at the pueblo of
Pecos, where there is sufficient lodging for the said fifty-two
families;" 4) the alcalde of Pecos was "to set aside a small portion of
these lands [presumably those of the pueblo] so that said families may
plant them for themselves at their pleasure but without their children,
heirs, or a substitute being able to inherit them;" 5) everyone must
share in work on the plaza, irrigation ditches, and other projects in
the common good. They agreed.

"Therefore," wrote Alcalde Ortiz in the standard
language of land grants,

I took them by the hand and stated in loud and
intelligible voice that in the name of His Majesty (God save him),
without prejudice to his Royal Estate or that of a third party, I had
conducted them over these lands. They pulled up grass, threw rocks, and
shouted "Long live the king," taking possession of said lands quietly
and peacefully without the least opposition. [1]

Antonio José Ortiz

Evidently it took them some time to get themselves
together. Although Lorenzo Márquez and Domingo Padilla, two of the El Vado
grantees, or their Indian namesakes, showed up as early as the 1780s in
the Pesos books as godfathers and marriage witnesses, no one identified
as a settler of El Vado appeared until late 1798. Until they had homes
up and fields planted, most of them preferred to leave their families in
Santa Fe. Interestingly enough, the first entry for an El Vado
resident, dated November 28, 1798, records the marriage of Juan de Dios
Fernacute;ndez, "citizen (vecino) of El Vado and formerly an Indian of
Pecos," to María, daughter of grantee Juan Armijo, "performed with the
consent of their parents." A few Pecos, it would seem, did join the El
Vado settlements, but very few. [2]

Allotting Farm Lands

By early 1803, the plaza, puesto, or población
of San Miguel del Vado boasted fifty-eight heads of family. Having
persevered the required five years, they had earned their legal stake in
the community. In recognition, Governor Chacón "by verbal order"
dispatched don Pedro Bautista Pino, who later gained a wider fame as New
Mexico's delegate to the Spanish Cortés of 1810-1813. It was
March, just before planting time. Don Pedro's job was to allot the
available farm lands among all the families. "Because of the many bends
of the river," measuring the total was a pain.

Pedro Bautista Pino

He began at the north. With the help of the
interested parties he marked off the requisite number of parcels, trying
as best he could to make them all equally desirable. Most were 50 or 65
varas wide, measured along the irrigation ditch, a few were 100 or 130
varas, and the largest 230. To match family and parcel, Pino had them
draw lots. Then on a list next to the name of each, he entered the
number of varas. One piece was reserved for the magistrate of the
community, and a smaller surplus parcel to support three Masses annually
for the souls in Purgatory. After the drawing, he marked the northern
boundary at "a hill on the bank of the river above the mouth of the
acequia that contains these lands," and in the south "the promontory of
the hill of the pueblo and cañada they call Los Temporales." That
left room for expansion southward.

Finally, don Pedro called them all together and
admonished them to put up promptly solid landmarks of rock. That would
prevent disputes. None of them, he concluded, was free to sell or
otherwise alienate his land for a period of ten years, beginning that
day, March 12, 1803. After he had gone through the same routine two days
later at the settlement of San José del Vado, three miles
upstream from San Miguel, distributing farm land to forty-five men and
two women, Pedro Bautista Pino made ready to ride back to Santa Fe. The
settlers crowded around him. Nine years later he recalled the scene in
his book.

During the administration of Señor
Chacón, I was commissioned to found at El Vado de[l Río]
Pecos two settlements, and to distribute lands to more than 200
families. After I concluded this operation, and upon taking leave of
them (having refused the fee they were going to give me for my labor),
my heart, at that moment as never before, was overcome with joy. Parents
and little children surrounded me, all of them expressing, even to the
point of tears, their gratitude to me for having given them lands for
their subsistence. [3]

Spiritual Neglect of Pecos

The presence of so many Spaniards and mixed-bloods
making love, giving birth, and dying on the Río Pecos, at first
far away downriver but still within the jurisdiction of the mission,
should have meant closer attention to Pecos by the Franciscans. And it
did for a time. Then, as the disparity widened, as the El Vado
settlements propagated and Pecos shrunk further and further, the priest
moved out to El Vado and visited the Pecos less often than when he had
resided in Santa Fe.

For the missionaries of New Mexicowhose
priest-to-parishioner ratio had been thrown all out of proportion by the
Hispano population spiraloverworked, undersupported, and often
demoralized, it became a question of numbers. In 1794, there were 165
Pecos Indians and no settlers at El Vado; in 1820 only 58 Pecos, but by
then 735 settlers. The friars responded accordingly.

Baptisms, marriages, and burials of Pecos Indians and
settlers of the El Vado district:

Whether justified by numbers or not, Christian
nurture of Mission Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles at Pecos
during this period can be summarized in one wordneglect. The same
thing can of course be said of the colony as a whole. At the very end of
1799, when the authorities were again considering the creation of a
diocese of New Mexico, as they did every so often, the province,
including El Paso, was composed of nine districts with 23,648 Spaniards
and mixed-bloods and 10,557 Indians, or a total population of
34,205.

The villa of Santa Fe, with its 120-man presidial
garrison and its population of 3,450 Spaniards, was the seat of a
district that also included the missions of Tesuque and Pecos. In all,
the province had twenty-six Indian missions. For the support of a
missionary at each, the king provided the annual 330-peso allowance,
except at Zuñi where 900 pesos were allotted for two. The few
secular priests dispatched from Durango to serve the four villas did not
often stay long in poor New Mexico. Seculars ministered at Santa Fe and
El Paso, but the Franciscans were left to care for both Albuquerque and
Santa Cruz de la Cañada. The missions were nine friars short.
Pecos as usual was vacant.

Whoever filled the vacancy at Pecos, at least on
paper, should reside in the mission and gather to him the new
establishment or settlement of Spaniards and mixed-bloods on the
Río Pecos. Although it is rather distant, for now there is no
other means of administering this settlement since it is not yet duly
established. But in time it will inevitably need a minister. [5]

Interim Ministers from Santa
Fe

During the 1790s, the assistant pastor at Santa Fe, a
Castilian Spaniard named Buenaventura Merino, had been assigned to look
after the Pecos. He came round every few months. He also saw to the Tewa
pueblo of Tesuque, just north of Santa Fe. Born on February 24, 1745, at
Villavicencio de los Caballeros in the diocese of León, the
forty-year-old Merino had landed in America in 1785 with a group of
recruits for the missionary college of San Fernando de México,
supplier of Franciscans to Alta California. He had hated the rigorous
routine at the college. After four and a half years of it, he threw in
with the disillusioned Fray Severo Patero, just back from Spain's
aborted Nootka Sound colony. Together they petitioned the viceroy for
permission to serve in New Mexico. The college's superior, who pointed
to the crying need for missionaries in California, chose to release
them, and the two had shown up in Santa Fe in September of 1790.

Reporting on his ministry in 1801, Father Merino put
the total population of Pecos pueblo at 59 males and 64 females. There
were 182 settlers downriver at San Miguel del Vado, 85 of them men and
boys and 97 women and girls. Characterized by the friar as "very poor,"
both Hispanos and Indians grew maize, wheat, and a few vegetables in
fields irrigated by the Río Pecos, but only enough to subsist.
They ran only a few head of cattle and no sheep or goats "because the
enemies don't let them increase." Filling out the rest of the
questionnaire, Merino declared that in his district there were no
industries or commerce worth mentioning, no bridges over the river, and
no good timber for the royal navy. [6]

Fray Buenaventura Merino

Merino's successor, Fray Diego Martínez
Arellano, a discouraged Mexican veteran who began ministering at Pecos
and El Vado in the spring of 1802, greeted his reassignment after two
years as a blessing. Writing his last entry in the book of baptisms, he
let his feelings show. He could not find the parents of the Pecos baby
girl he had just baptized. The reason was plain. "All the Indians,"
noted Martínez, "live publicly in concubinage because the
officials, both Spaniards and Indians, tolerate it. And the minister can
do nothing to remedy it because they tell him he is being indiscreet."
[7]

Their next minister, one of the newly arrived
peninsular Spaniards, stayed around longer but devoted almost all his
time to El Vado. Thirty-five-year-old Fray Francisco Bragado y Rico,
from the neigbborhood of tiny Villalonso and Benafarces in the diocese
of Zamora, Castilla la Vieja, had "no degrees other than being a
Christian, priest, and friar of Our Father St. Francis." [8] He appeared at Pecos in June 1804 and very
soon took up the cause of the settlers.

It was not right that "the genízaros" of the
new settlement had been denied Mass and the word of God simply because
they lived so far from Pecos over "a bad and very perilous road." They
deserved a chapel of their own, where they could be baptized, married,
and buried without an all-day journey. They had in fact already begun
one by December of 1804 when Bragado petitioned the bishop of Durango
for a license. "This settlement," he wrote, "is composed of one hundred
and twenty families, all poor and unfortunate people with no greater
resource for their subsistence than their own labor and no greater
possessions than the little land with which Our Sovereign (God save him)
has succored them." It worked. By the following spring, they had the
license. [9]

Hos-ta (The Lightning), governor of
Jémez pueblo, after a watercolor by Richard H. Kern, August 20,
1849. Simpson, Journal